‘DEFEAT JIHAD SUMMIT’ CHALLENGES JIHADISM AND OBAMA ‘STRATEGY’

Center for Security Policy, Washington DC, on February 10, 2015, hosted a summit that challenged jihadism and Obamas ‘strategy’. Below extracts from a presentation on the Center website:

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The summit might best be described as the War for the Free World convened in Washington, D.C. The purpose was to anticipate and rebut the thesis of President Obama’s “Countering Violent Extremism Summit” later in February – namely, that the United States faces hostile forces whose identity, motivations and capabilities are defined by an opaque euphemism: violent extremism.

The “Defeat Jihad Summit” was sponsored by the Center for Security Policy and brought together present and former, domestic and foreign political leaders, senior military officers, national security professionals and other experts on Islamic supremacism and its guiding doctrine, shariah. Among the noteworthy participants in this roundtable discussion were:

• A discussion of the nature of our jihadist enemies and the mainstream – not extremist –character of their inspiration: the politico-military-legal shariah doctrine derived from the sacred texts, institutions and authorities of Islam. There was widespread agreement that wemust understand and be able to name our foes, not pretend that they and their motivations are unknowable.

• The global jihad takes various forms including: the violent kind; civilization (or cultural, stealthy and subversive) jihad; institutional jihad (employing entities like the multinational Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the United Nations under the OIC’s influence); individual jihad (its perpetrators are mistakenly being described as “lone wolves”); and material support (which, under shariah, is prized as highly as the service of those who take up the sword).

• America urgently needs a strategy for countering all such jihadist endeavors – one that brings to bear all instruments of national power to achieve a decisive correlation of forces and our victory. We face a truly existential threat from the global jihad movement, as do other nations of the Free World now under assault for sharing our values and love of liberty.

• The National Security Strategy unveiled by President Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, and the draft Authorization for the Use of Military Force being proposed by the administration are wholly inadequate. The former compounds the inadequacies of the President’s “lead-from-behind” approach with an even more passive one: “strategic patience”; the latter appears calculated to fail and to embolden, rather than defeat, the Islamic State or any other foe.

• Instead, the summit discussed an alternative, modeled on the counter-ideological strategy President Reagan laid out in his National Security Decision Directive 75 – his administration’s plan to destroy Soviet communism. Speaker Gingrich, Senator Cruz, and a number of the other speakers recommended this plan of action – dubbed the “Secure Freedom Strategy”.

The participants in the Defeat Jihad Summit have rendered a real public service. Their insights, analyses and recommendations concerning the threat from shariah-adherent Muslims and the need to empower and join forces with others in the Muslim community who eschew that brutally repressive ideology create the basis for a far more sound, effective and durable national security strategy.